IMAGINE A COLLEGE student who is the victim of date rape. Or a woman who drinks too much and wakes up worried that she might be pregnant. Or a woman who realizes that she and her husband neglected to use birth control.

Such experiences happen every day. The idea of Plan B -- formerly called the "the morning after pill" -- was to offer a safe and effective method of backup birth control that would prevent unwanted pregnancies and thereby reduce the number of abortions.

Let's be clear: Plan B is emergency contraception. It is not Mifepristone (RU-486), which is a pill that induces a medical abortion and ends a pregnancy.

To work most effectively, however, Plan B must be taken within 72 hours after unprotected sex. That doesn't leave much time to see a doctor and get a prescription filled at a pharmacy.

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But would this be safe? That is what a Food and Drug Administration advisory scientific panel investigated for several years. In December 2003, the panel voted unanimously that the drug was safe for women and then 23 to 4 that it should be available without prescription. The FDA typically follows the advice of its advisory panels.

Not this time. Last week, the FDA ruled against over-the-counter sales of Plan B, citing concerns about whether teenage girls would use it safely.

Many feminist, pro-choice and reproductive-rights groups viewed the decision as part of the Bush administration's larger religious and political agenda to promote abstinence only, without permitting discussion of birth control, and to end the legal right to abortion.

The Feminist Majority, for example, expressed outrage that the FDA had ignored the estimated million people who rallied in support of reproductive rights at the April 25 March for Women's Lives in Washington. President Eleanor Smeal said, "The FDA, in rejecting its own expert advisory panels, is allowing right-wing politics to trump science at the expense of women's health. "

Both the American Public Health Association and the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, an international medical association representing more than 11,000 health-care providers, researchers and educators in the field, expressed strong concern that politics, rather than a process of medical and scientific review, had resulted in a decision that would cause more unintended pregnancies and abortions.

Dr. Felicia Stewart, co-director of the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy at UCSF, said, "The FDA has done a terrible disservice to the public with this decision and continues to manifest a pattern of disregard for science from the current administration."

To opponents of Plan B, who worry that easy access might increase sexual promiscuity and that teenagers should have clinical supervision, Wayne Shields, ARHP president responded: "These arguments ... are red herrings. In fact, countries that allow OTC access to EC (emergency contraception) and offer comprehensive sex and sexuality education have far lower rates of teen pregnancy and abortion than we do. It's a no-brainer."

In this country, however, Plan B remains a well-kept secret. Since 2002, for example, California has permitted women to obtain emergency contraception without a prescription but from a participating pharmacist. Yet a February 2004 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that only 9 percent of California women knew about such "pharmacy access" and that only 18 percent of pharmacies were participating in the new program.

You'd think those who oppose abortion would embrace a safe method of contraception. A December 2002 study by the prestigious Alan Guttmacher Institute estimated that emergency contraception probably prevented 51,000 abortions in 2000. But many social conservatives support "abstinence only" as strongly as they oppose abortion.

We live in an excessively sexualized culture that uses sex to sell us everything from cars to clothes. Yet we are also heirs of a Victorian legacy that makes us uncomfortable teaching young people about sex and that insists that if nice girls and women "do it," they -- and not men -- should suffer the wages of sin.

Last week, the FDA decision demonstrated that our society is still terribly divided about the role of women and their sexuality in a modern society.